


Light my way

by inkfeathers



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Eren is very dramatic, M/M, Reincarnation, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 01:43:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17889194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkfeathers/pseuds/inkfeathers
Summary: Eren is certain the stranger he keeps seeing must only exist in his imagination.





	Light my way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pathomatose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pathomatose/gifts).



> This is a (late) birthday gift to my fandom wife who I love and adore. Thank you for being a wonderful friend and human and for all the laughs you pull out of me <3 Don't know what I'd do without you!

He is an apparition. 

 

Eren is sure of it. 

 

He has spent so much time alone, he has started making stuff up. Making people up. He is a product of Eren’s long-damaged mind. 

 

Maybe it’s silly to assume a person he has never talked to before doesn’t exist, but Eren has seen and experienced crazier shit. His mind isn’t right, he knows that by now. As much as he knows there is something different about this person. This illusive, impossible person. He can’t explain what it is, much less go find out for himself, but he knows it’s there. He knows it as clear as he knows his own eyes.

 

Though he can see him--and he sees him regularly--he’s always at a distance, never close enough to touch. Yet even so there is something he somehow recognizes about him, something that goes beyond him being a familiar stranger. It’s in his eyes, in the press of his lips, in the way he moves, in the way he quiets. When he looks at him, Eren feels like looking at a mirror.

 

Irrationally, deliriously, Eren thinks this stranger knows him. 

 

When he sees him walking among the crowd, eyes always so lost and no one ever by his side, Eren thinks this stranger  _ understands _ .

 

And that’s how he figures he must not be real. 

 

It wouldn’t be the first time his mind has played tricks on him, it wouldn’t even be the first time he had confused fantasy with reality.

 

How many times had he woken up screaming at imaginary bright-eyed people? How many times had a loud noise made him look out for giant monsters?

 

And yet the stranger keeps showing up at random places, with hair as golden as Eren’s hometown wheat fields and big, troubled amber eyes. 

 

He is beautiful in ways Eren has never thought of anyone as beautiful, like how he always hesitates before asking for help at a shop, or how he catches him by the pet store with his fingers stuck on the bird cages, even though there is a sign right there asking not to do so.

 

He is beautiful even when he shouldn’t be beautiful. One time he saw him red-nosed and sneezing all over his small handkerchief, and even then he’d wanted to run over and say;  _ You are the most breathtaking person I have ever seen, please I need to know your name.  _

 

The word  _ perfect _ always sticks on his head every time he sees him, and Eren just doesn’t get it. Doesn’t understand how someone he’s never met could elicit so many as yet unknown emotions in him, could make him feel a little bit less alone. So he pretends he doesn’t exist, and so he goes about his life. 

 

*****

 

He could just try and talk to him. 

 

He sees him at the park every single Saturday. Feeding the birds, his usually afflicted face softening in a rare but--and he can’t believe he is thinking this--precious smile. One that he can’t help but think he’s seen before. 

 

He could sit next to him. Bring some bread with him and say something like; _ hey, I’ve seen you here before, feeding the birds. Could I sit here with you?  _ And when the stranger turned to look at him like he’d grown two heads, when he couldn’t see any recognition in those fairy-like features, he could finally move on and berate himself for believing in such a thing as fate, and he could continue pretending the stranger wasn’t real. He would become an insignificant memory on Eren’s head that would eventually disappear and take part of the world of things Eren has chosen to forget.

 

Either that or he’d see himself reflected on the glint of those golden gems, see his own confusion, his own sorrow and his own fears looking right back at him. Two planets colliding into each other wouldn’t begin to describe how that scenario would be like. 

 

Both possibilities scare the living hell out of him. 

 

And up until now, Eren never thought he’d be afraid of anything.    
  
****

 

If there is a God, He must think of Eren as an amusing pastime. 

 

Not only does he sees him everywhere now, he dreams about him every night. He dreams about him in ways one shouldn’t dream about a stranger. The delusions so intimate Eren wakes up in a sweat and hanging desperately onto the last minutes of unconsciousness because he’s never felt such things in his  _ “life” _ as he does in his dreams. Not for anything, nor for anyone. But it isn’t long until he forgets what the dream was about, and can only remember that wonderful warmth of shared dreams and mutual comfort. He says the stranger’s name on his dreams too, but he never remembers it in the morning. 

 

****

 

He remembers it one day. 

 

“ _ Armin.” _ He’d whispered into the night, blood pumping with it, heart galloping wildly. 

 

_ Armin,  _ he’d written on the nearest notebook at hand, and then again with his finger on the window of a car.

  
  


****

 

When they finally meet it doesn’t feel like the collision of two planets so much as the momentous explosion that started the whole universe. It shakes Eren to his core, destroys and builds him anew. Reborn in round, honey-colored eyes.

 

It happens on a cold, colorless morning, when he found himself with nothing to do after they’d given him off at work, and he’d gone for a lonely walk at the park. It had become something of a habit on rainy days, the sound of his footsteps against the little puddles of water bringing him a sort of comfort he couldn’t quite explain, and the steady flow of the river managing to appease his ever inexorable thoughts. 

 

Somehow he’d forgotten his jacket at home, and he was shivering in his faded jersey when a mat of blond hair passed his vision. 

 

Everything blurred around that fixed point in the horizon, as it was bound to do whenever  _ he  _ passed by. It was as if he drew an invisible hook that had Eren revolving around him whenever he was close enough to fall helplessly into his orbit, and he was powerless to do anything other than watch. So absorbed was he on the cause of his restlessness, that it went off his mind were his feet were taking him, until he found himself being swallowed by cold, deep water. 

 

Looking back at it, it had all been very symbolic. The rain, the river, the freezing lake. All of it leading up that morning to him finding himself directly under those long-dreamed for eyes, eyes that looked down at him in distress just after he’d been pulled hurriedly out of the water. 

 

It was as if a thick mist had dissolved before his eyes, leaving the bright, blinding sun behind. Memories bustled and collapsed together inside his head to form a big, devastating picture of a world he had once belonged to, a world he had never really left behind. And at the center of it all stood  _ him _ , different but all around the same, and it was only because of his presence that Eren could find his breath once again.

 

“ _ You _ ,” he had let out once he found his speech. 

 

“You…” he received back, when Armin found his. 

 

They had stayed like that for awhile, marveling at each other’s existence, both too scared to utter another word, but there were no words needed between them in that moment. 

 

The realization struck Eren like lighting then that this was their new beginning. That there, as he lay trembling, stood before him a second chance, undeserved as it undoubtedly was.  

 

The recently open wound would no doubt never stop aching, and there was a lot he would need to make up for, but it was okay. He could see it. It was there in that gentle face, in that timid smile. Everything would be okay. 

 

Together, everything would be alright. 

 


End file.
